How to create safer roads for Kiwis

The New Zealand Transport Authority (NZTA) partnered with Catalystand Orbica to revolutionise CAS, the Crash Analysis System used by engineers, policy makers and researchers around New Zealand to make our roads safer.

Using open source geospatial tools, CAS presents the data of every crash reported by Police from 1980 to today. The system uses maps and reports that can be interrogated for detailed analysis to support roading planning, policing, policy initiatives, and other critical activities that contribute to safer journeys.

CAS is a complete rebuild of the twenty-year-old system using modern, web-based technologies and user interfaces. CAS integrates complex historical crash datasets with geospatial data to produce mapping and analysis tools.

The new system effectively brings together Business Intelligence (BI), traditional reporting and geospatial visualisation in one intuitive application.

The system elegantly handles multiple layers of data, not just flat files, and users are able to query at any level and display results visually on a map as well as run reports associated with the query. The users of the system have enthusiastically embraced the new system, with feedback describing the new system as “fantastic to use’.

In ensuring that the data from historical crashes is accessible and able to be interrogated via mapping tools or reports, NZTA is acting as a responsible kaitiaki of that data. In using open source tools to build an intuitive interface to query the data, CAS is available to more than 1000 authorised users without restrictive licensing fees and provides a level of assurance about future resilience of the tool.